Why don’t people want to use mastodon?
Are they following rasputin again?
Does Mastodon refuse to deal with its issues, like Lemmy?
Anecdotally, I joined Mastodon, found it difficult to find people who I personally know that were on different instances, kind of lost interest and thought kbin might be a better solution for both forums and microblogs all in one place, then my Mastodon instance shut down, and then kbin died too. Hence me being on lemmy.world, as default and stable of a server as there is here.
Bluesky felt fun and familiar right off the bat, my only issue was that it was still so small when I joined. Now that there’s an influx of new users, many of whom I followed on the bird site, it just feels like Twitter 2, which I suspect is what most people want.
FWIW I have a highly technical job and consider myself pretty tech literate, so I don’t think any of the issues I had with Mastodon weren’t things I could’ve figured out or worked around, I just didn’t feel incentivized to bother. I suspect they’ve smoothed out a lot of the federating issues I saw before, but at this point I’m happy enough on Bluesky to stay put.
There’s an add-on to help find the people you followed on Twitter on Bluesky, FYI.
Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sky-follower-bridge/behhbpbpmailcnfbjagknjngnfdojpko?hl=en
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/sky-follower-bridge/
If there are these roadblack to you as a profficient computer toucher then I think it’s safe to say this is system is already doomed to cultural irrelevance, at best just another one of our private clubhouse nerdtoys, sad !
Hopefully this defeat in the face of bluesky shocks the dev out of their uncompromising complacency and start fighting FOR the users
It’s entirely possible that my timing was just bad for Mastodon and good for Lemmy. The fact that I could jump on Boost and have an extremely familiar experience was a big plus. Bluesky was more similar in terms of migration experience to Lemmy than Mastodon was.
The other issue is that in a forum site you follow topics, where on a microblog site you follow people. The topics are here on Lemmy (to some extent), even if the people aren’t, but I don’t really care about the individual contributors as much. The people I wanted to follow for microblogging went to Bluesky, and that matters a lot more there.
yea in the beginning it can be hard. Just start following people. And get your timeline filling. Try to check out other users posts/comments and follow them as well if you want to. So you get started.
That was actually part of my issue, and I experienced the same problem on Bluesky at first. The difference for me was ease of discovery and the influx of people I followed on other platforms. If they had gone to Mastodon instead, I’d have been more inclined to give it more effort. As it stands, I’m content with Bluesky and don’t feel I’m missing much on Mastodon. Perhaps I’m mistaken, and that’s my loss. Just trying to add some perspective.
We need those cracked TikTok algos which keep children glued to their screens for 16 hours a day
Meanwhile, I’m technologically thick as shit and have no trouble using Mastodon at all. If I know someone is on there I’ll find their profile and follow them. Done.
It ain’t that complicated.
It’s important to note that my experience is from a year ago, and I imagine a lot has changed. Part of my issue at the time was that I couldn’t see things like who people I followed were following because they were on a different server, which made discovery challenging. Also very few people who I followed on the bird site went to Mastodon.
I’m not saying the platform can’t work or that the barriers make it unusable, just that the draw wasn’t there to warrant the investment in learning a more complex platform than the alternatives.
Mastodon does refuse to deal with its issues but i wouldnt say that about Lemmy. Lemmy just has a very small dev team working off no funding.
Those aren’t rumors. The Lemmy repo is quite open about this. Lemmy’s devs are part of the Tankie problem here.
Honestly, Kbin and Mbin are looking very attractive, not being run by extremists. Lemmy, as a product, is dragged down by the Tankies that make it - just as Pleroma (a Mastodon alternative) is dragged down by the Neo-Nazis that make it.
Why don’t people want to use mastodon?
Because it doesn’t have a proper discover feed.
But there is a discover feed in Mastodon, isn’t it ? That’s what I use to discover new accounts. Am I missing something ? For me Mastodon is way better that twitter and I wish more people used it.
Discover feed in Mastodon sucks a lot for me, the number of posts there are very limited and not tailed to my preferences. On one hand, that makes it less addicting than twitter which is good for me, on the other hand, it doesn’t make me use it much which is also good for me but bad for them ig.
email. email is federated. literally everyone has an email address and understands they might be on a different service, but its all email, and you just use their account name and the service part with the @ in between.
it’s not a complicated subject at all, and a good chunk of the humans on earth have no experience being alive without a federated service being a part of their daily life. (lets not mention telephones, or national postal services)
the issue isn’t perceived complexity, it’s that the negatives of using a centralized service are outweighed by the benefits. people don’t see it as a personal liberty issue, or a free speech issue, or a propaganda issue, or a billionaire oligarchs ability to control the flow of information between citizens issue. they just want it to be easy to use. and the more people that do it, the less personal responsibility they feel about the choice.
learning from history is for suckers, I guess
Heck: phones. Phones are federated. I pay for my phone service through one company, and you pay for your phone service through another, but I can still call you as long as I dial the right number.
The issue isn’t really that federation makes things hard. The issue is that it’s not how people are used to social media, and very specifically social media, working. And people are strange creatures of habit who hate change.
Not enough people on Mastodon are into the things I was using Twitter/use BlueSky for.
That’s regular critical mass problem. The real question is why the Xitter exodee didn’t make it to mastodon in the first place?
When I investigated, I didn’t get past the account creation stage. Because each server is its own fiefdom and your account will largely be prisoner there, the more you get tangled on it, the more you become subject to its rules. I found that unacceptable.
Yes, I never got past that stage. It seems most instances are either nazis, crybullies or flake. I guess first step of joining mastodon is buying a domain name to run a server instance on and then join mastodon as a single user instance. But then I assume most servers also ban single user instance and I just could not be bothered to join was is probably “worse twitter” when I never participated in the twitter mental illness in the first place.
